"What do you expect with only 1 GB memory in Vista?" a random second stage Dell support guy just asked me after I told him that the system crashes with a Kernel_Inpage_Error bluescreen. "It's just not sufficient for Video Processing."

Well my experience has been that mencoder, whether running on Linux, or Windows is so resource friendly that there really isn't a problem usually. And my understanding is also that if any problems should occur, they should be a slow and unresponsive system due to massive swapping -- and not a bluescreen. But of course that's only my lowly knowledge of about 10 years of computer support and 8 years of Linux fun.

Well after I responded shocked and directly asked him whether he was implying that blue screens would be normal and acceptable we withdrew his statement and agreed to have someone look at the device. I'm still not certain, though, if they will stick to their position that because my girlfriend ordered a system from their Vostro business laptop series and their database has her name marked as a company name, that she won't get the 2 years mandatory warranty, but only 1 year as a business would get.

Though actually that shouldn't make a difference with an error that couldn't possibly appear through mishandling of the system but must've been there from the beginning: The system crashes after some time with heavy load (longer times around 50 % may be enough, though). For a while the hard disk, whose SMART data reports a critical heat, stopped working and simply wasn't detected at boot time.

But the Dell guys didn't really understand that either. They said that it could just be a natural phenomena that a fan only has a life time of about a year and hence the system was perfectly fine at the time it was turned over to my girlfriend.

But I don't want to bore you any further with a story that probably happens everywhere to everyone and all the time in the daily Windows world... While hardware problems occur in Linux just as well, at least the people you talk to about them don't treat you like an idiot but really know their stuff.

In the end the error seems to have been the intel dynamic acceleration technology. After I "upgraded" the BIOS to the same version it already had been I looked through the BIOS and thought I'd try disabling it. Now the fan is slightly less loud and more importantly: the computer no longer seems to crash as it did before.

1 comment:

I once received a Dell desktop PC for repair. The Windows install was already hosed. I had to back up the data files from the hard drive. So I booted the PC from a Linux liveCD and attempted to transfer files over the LAN. It was then I discovered the on-board ethernet didn't work. I copied the files to an external USB, then called Dell. The technician I got on the phone insisted that ethernet would not work until the Windows drivers were in place on the boot drive. This was a "gold" support technician I was talking to. I asked for his supervisor.